It's easy for example to overlook trauma, and just blame ourselves "why can't we just be happy" or our brain's chemistry, while ignoring all the terrible things that happened to us, because it's too painful to relieve them.
Aren't treatments like this like reducing a person's fever by force (which they got because of a bacteria infection) while not fixing the underlying issue that caused it in the first place?
TL;DR: Instead of asking "What's wrong with you?" and making that part right by force, shouldn't we be asking "What happened to you?" and helping with that?
Medicinal treatments along with therapy can help.
I wonder to what extent this mindset of viewing depression as purely biological is responsible for keeping people in depression by removing their sense of agency over it, as well as fostering dependence on drugs that at best result in temporary relief with a constant need for ever-increasing dosages as desensitization arises, and at worst can actually dramatically worsen one's mental condition (happened to a friend of mine recently who started experiencing depression since COVID lockdowns, was prescribed medication by a therapist, which seemed to be working at first until he started experiencing bipolar psychosis, and has now been switched to another medication and had to have the police called on him after multiple episodes of insanity, and is now on the verge of being sent to a mental hospital)
> Someone mentions lack of willpower and personal agency.
It's honestly incredible how people STILL try to argue that depressed people should "just get over with it", just stop being sad and stop being lazy. My god.
Excuse me, but you have fundamentally failed at understanding what depression even is and apparently conflate it with some rebel teenager phase during puberty by telling people to just get a grip on themselves.
Even the original commenter stated that for some, depression is purely biological, whereas for others, it may involve behavioral components. It's kind of ridiculous that anytime someone mentions personal agency in a depression thread, one gets heavily downvoted with hoards of commenters jumping in to say "depression is purely biological and only treatable through medication and therapy!" Ok, perhaps this is true for many depressed people, but what is the breakdown of depressed people who's depression is purely biological like this vs. those who's depression is also behavioral (I would guess the former being a small minority)? Why are we not allowed to acknowledge the latter? How does speaking to self-agency make anyone worse off?
Depression is complex. Let's not reduce it to something as simple as being a biological disease curable only via medication and therapy. In the past I would've said something along the same lines as my previous posts but excused myself out of the conversation earlier since I don't really have a horse in this race. But now that I have a close friend who's experiencing psychosis and basically lost his mind (eg. running around naked, talking to voices in his head) due to some psychiatrist prescribing him with the "wrong" depression medication, the issue has become personal to me. Apparently even the "experts" don't seem to know how to treat depression, so let's not speak so condescendingly and matter-of-factly as if anyone knows what they're talking about here.
That mindset is called a medical and scientific mindset[1]. You need to educate yourself before you hurt someone.
Your invitation to "educate yourself" seems condescending and unnecessary.
Good intentions or not.
First, that's borderline impossible to the point that it's an impractical and irrelevant suggestion. Second, for many, including myself, not much results but more stress and misery. Depression isn't one disease and is just a syndrome (a set of symptoms) caused by many different unrelated conditions and for many people those causes are entirely biological- not behavioral- and need to be treated like any other physical ailment. For some people (but not all), medication, therapy or other treatment can cause an improvement great enough for them to do be able to do those things and for some of those people (but not all) doing those things does help.